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enTable of Contents - Historicizing Romantic Sexualityhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/toc.html
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<br/></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/jillian-heydt-stevenson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/bradford-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/daniel-j-oquinn-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Daniel J. O&#039;Quinn</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:37 +0000rc-admin14968 at http://www.rc.umd.eduHistoricizing Romantic Sexualityhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/index.html
<div class="field field-name-field-index-banner field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-index-banner" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/styles/index_banner/public/sexuality_banner%5B1%5D.jpg?itok=AED0PraE" width="640" height="213" alt="Historicizing Romantic Sexuality, Edited by Richard C. Sha" title="Historicizing Romantic Sexuality, Edited by Richard C. Sha" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="IndexContent">
<h2 class="TOC">Table of Contents</h2>
<ul id="TOCContent">
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/about.html">About this Volume</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/sha/sha_intro.html">"Introduction"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Richard C. Sha, American University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#sha">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/sha/sha_intro.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/sha/sha.html">"The Uses and Abuses of Historicism: Halperin and Shelley on the Otherness of Ancient Greek Sexuality"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Richard C. Sha, American University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#sha">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/sha/sha.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/loesberg/loesberg.html">"Foucault and the Hedgerow History of Sexuality"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Jonathan Loesberg, American University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#loesberg">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/loesberg/loesberg.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/fay/fay.html">"Framing Romantic Dress: Mary Robinson, Princess Caroline and the Sex/Text"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Elizabeth Fay, University of Massachusetts Boston</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#fay">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/fay/fay.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/heydt/heydt.html">"'Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business': Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's Juvenilia"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, University of Colorado, Boulder</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#heydt">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/heydt/heydt.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/lanser/lanser.html">"'Put to the Blush': Romantic Irregularities and Sapphic Tropes"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#lanser">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/lanser/lanser.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/mudge/mudge.html">"How to Do the History of Pornography: Romantic Sexuality and its Field of Vision"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Bradford K. Mudge, University of Colorado at Denver</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#mudge">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/mudge/mudge.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/oquinn/oquinn.html">"The State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desire"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Daniel O'Quinn, University of Guelph</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#oquinn">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/oquinn/oquinn.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/halperin/halperin.html">"'That Obscure Object of Historical Desire'"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">David M. Halperin, University of Michigan</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#halperin">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/halperin/halperin.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/elfenbein/elfenbein.html">"Romantic Loves: A Response to <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i>"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html#elfenbein">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/sexuality/elfenbein/elfenbein.html">Essay</a></li>
</ul>
</div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-edited-by field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Edited By:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:EDT"><a href="/person/sha-richard-c">Sha, Richard C.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-technical-editor field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource Technical Editor:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/byrne-joseph">Byrne, Joseph</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/jillian-heydt-stevenson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/bradford-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/daniel-j-oquinn-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Daniel J. O&#039;Quinn</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-52 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource (Taxonomy):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/praxis-series/historicizing-romantic-sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:30 +0000rc-admin14946 at http://www.rc.umd.edu"That Obscure Object of Historical Desire"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/halperin/halperin.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div id="container"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>"That Obscure Object of Historical Desire"</h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>David M. Halperin, University of Michigan</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">David Halperin responds to the essays in this collection, many of which respond to his 2002 book, _How to Do the History of Homosexuality_. This essay appears in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><ol><li><p>I was of course pleased but also quite surprised when Richard Sha wrote me to say that he had conceived the idea of a volume for the Romantic Circles Praxis Series that would consist of responses to my 2002 book, <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>. I know little, and so I said little, about the Romantic period in that book, and I didn't see how my speculations would be especially helpful to Romanticists. So it was with a good deal of interest that I read the stimulating essays collected here, but it was also with a continuing sense of puzzlement&#8212;a puzzlement shared, evidently, by some of the contributors themselves, who could identify only extremely tenuous or general connections between their work and my own. The result, which will be reflected in the commentary that follows, has been a pronounced fluctuation in our level of engagement with one another's work.</p></li><li><p>I found myself most in sympathy with the projects of Susan Lanser and Bradford Mudge. Lanser's effort to imagine and to describe a history of female homosexuality separate from that of male homosexuality is very much in line with a couple of hints contained in my book, as she notes, though the credit for conceiving lesbianism as both a perennial potentiality within and a possible menace to the social structures of male dominance belongs to Gayle Rubin and to Valerie Traub, as Lanser also knows.<a href="#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a> Moreover, Lanser seems to be elaborating the tension that Traub discerns in English Renaissance discourses between the figure of the tribade and the figure of the friend, the former being a monstrous image of sex and gender deviance while the latter embodies the possibility of a female homoeroticism contained within the bounds of virtue and the canons of femininity. When Lanser writes of "the fine line of external appearance that separates the gender-bending sapphist from the virtuous friend," I wonder about two things. First, what sort of historical connections does Lanser see between the phenomena described by Traub in the earlier period and what Lanser calls "the lines separating virtuous from transgressive alliances" in her period&#8212;lines which, she says, "were often literally paper thin"? Second, I wonder whether or not it makes sense to attempt to construct, from whatever resemblances there might be between "the tribade" and "the gender-bending sapphist" on the one hand and the virtuous female friends of the early modern and Romantic periods on the other, two enduring types or figures or forms of life that would correspond, within the history of lesbianism, to the sorts of transhistorical categories that compose a genealogy of male homosexuality, at least according to the model I sketched out in the title essay of my book.</p></li><li><p>The source of my greatest sympathy with Lanser springs from her avowed interest in the possible connections between homosexuality and cultural forms, because that interest happens to coincide with my current preoccupations.<a href="#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a> Lanser seeks to uncover and to clarify the relation between poetic tropes and female homosexuality as well as the relation between poetic discourse and the history of sexuality in general: "I want to ask," she writes, "what we can learn about the place of sapphism in the Romantic imagination by looking at poetic tropes." I would like to encourage her to pursue and even to broaden that project, by analyzing the peculiar relevance of specific cultural forms to homosexuality itself. As she notes, Andrew Elfenbein has already provided a model for such a project in <em>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</em>, which inquires into what might be called the culture of homosexuality, by which I mean both homosexuality as a cultural practice and culture as a carrier of homosexual meanings. Elfenbein's achievement in that book, at least in the eyes of this non-specialist, consists in describing and assessing the particular sexual value that could be attached, and that came ultimately to be attached, to a cultural form&#8212;in this case, the theory and practice of individual genius. It is as if Elfenbein had identified, at a formative stage in the developmental history of European culture, what D. A. Miller identified at a formative stage in the developmental history of the gay male individual: namely, "those early pre-sexual realities of gay experience" that impart a definite, discernible gay orientation, a kind of gay internal logic, to an existence that has yet to crystallize into a homosexual identity&#8212;that can be described, therefore, only as proto-gay (26).</p></li><li><p>At least since the success of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and its spinoffs, it has become commonplace to regard homosexuality as somehow producing a unique perspective on the world as well as a cluster of superior insights into life, love, and matters of taste in general. According to this way of thinking, homosexuality involves not only specific sexual practices but a wide variety of distinctive social and cultural practices, a particular attitude to life, a critical take on straight society, a heightened sense of taste and style, a collectively shared but nonetheless singular outlook on the world. Of course, as any reader of Elfenbein's book knows, such a notion is nothing new&#8212;although its entry into the stock of received ideas that constitute the common sense of straight society has been relatively recent. It seems to me that Lanser may be in a good position to contribute an important and revealing chapter to the history of that notion, and to expand its purview within studies of female homoeroticism and homosexuality. "Tropics of discourse," ethical as well as literary genres, structures of feeling, and codes of behavior may offer a lot of useful material with which to think about sexuality as a cultural form no less than as an erotic practice.<a href="#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> It would be good to know more about the lesbian specifics of sexuality as culture.</p></li><li><p>Bradford Mudge's proposal "to include the emergence of pornography as one of the premier events of modern culture" in our new histories of both sexuality and literature is also most welcome and long overdue. Others have considered the rise of pornography in the eighteenth century to be formative for the constitution of modern sexual subjects.<a href="#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a> Mudge extends their work by providing a rigorously historicist approach to the very category of pornography that gives it new substance and greater precision in historical terms. As he writes, "The history of pornography begins at the moment that the word itself is dislodged as a 'given,' as an absolute that imposes itself anachronistically upon contested terrain." Although he apologizes for taking part in a "semantic shell game" that consists in arguing about what exactly the word means and to what phenomena it can be most accurately applied, he rightly insists that this sort of semantic quibbling "performs a necessary service, opening up 'pornography' as an imaginative construct whose history has the potential to complicate our ideas about human sexuality and its representations." The study of the word, its meaning, and the history of its deployment is crucial, because, "like 'homosexuality,' in other words, 'pornography' can uncritically erase the very historical process that brought it into being&#8212;regardless of critical intentions." Mudge's analysis dramatizes, and is intended to dramatize, the usefulness of the kind of historicism that I have tried to defend, so it's not surprising that I like his essay. I also agree with Mudge that many feminist critiques of pornography, in the course of their laudable efforts to focus attention on the enduring aspects of gender hierarchies, have despecified and essentialized it.<a href="#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a></p></li><li><p>Jill Heydt-Stevenson's study of the sexual exuberance of Jane Austen's early writings clearly fits in well with Mudge's project. Mudge writes:</p><blockquote>What if, however, modern "literature" had an evil twin, a shady and disreputable other whose pleasures mocked the refined taste of the public sphere even as they embodied the quintessence of its new consumer capitalism? What if, in other words, literature and pornography were complementary constructions whose Manichean drama (as artificial and self-serving a contest as those staged by professional wrestling) obscures the power with which they together construct and deploy sexual norms and deviancies? Then, presumably, the sexual bodies imagined by romantic fiction would become valuable prehistory to our modern paradigms; no longer either legitimate or illegitimate aesthetic representations, they would instead become both imaginative prefigurements of our lived realities and historical records of the evolving conflicts between private acts and the public domain that sought at once to express and control those acts.</blockquote></li><li><p>Daniel O'Quinn's effort to historicize "Equiano as a subject of desire" did not fail to evoke a grateful echo in me.<a href="#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a> I wonder if Equiano's post-conversion memoir affords material of sufficient quality and quantity to enable the critic to historicize his erotic subjectivity, but I can only applaud O'Quinn's impulse to "bring styles of thinking endemic to queer theory to bear on the historical materialism of much recent work on the relationship between colonial and metropolitan society in Romantic studies."</p></li><li><p>I now come to the essays by Jonathan Loesberg and Richard Sha, both of which contain substantial critiques of my work on Foucault and the history of sexuality, and which call for a more extended response. I shall try nonetheless to be brief.</p></li><li><p>Loesberg is envious of me. That is not a moral judgment: it is what he proudly and unapologetically declares. He endows me (undoubtedly for the first and last time in my life) with a heroic glamor, analogous to that attached to the survivors of the Normandy landings in the eyes of the post-Spielberg generation, and he positions himself as a "hedgerow historian"&#8212;that is, a detached, nostalgic spectator longing, at a safe distance, for the danger and glory of The Good Fight. In this case, that fight is over the proper uses of Foucault, of gay history, and of the interpretation of sexual life in ancient Greece. Loesberg's ostensibly frank avowal of the inauthenticity of his stake in these controversies&#8212;he has, he confesses, "no Greek, no Latin, no expertise in any of the requisite fields"&#8212;is, and is meant to be, disarming. In other words, it doesn't leave me much in the way of a viable subject-position from which to respond. Can the object of voyeuristic fascination speak? Can those who already know their credentials to be inauthentic suffer any further disqualification? As typically happens in public self-abasement, however, Loesberg confesses to the wrong sin: what he excuses himself for merely serves as a cover for a more dubious maneuver that he refuses to cop to.</p></li><li><p>To be perfectly uncharitable about it, Loesberg is unhappy because he feels excluded from the philosophical thrills of the history of homosexuality&#8212;and excluded by homosexuals, of all people, who have somehow managed to shoulder him aside in a come-from-behind triumph of radical chic. He wants to stake his claim to this territory, in particular to explore the philosophical issues that emerge from scholarly efforts to link history with politics, truth with power, Foucault's life with Foucault's work, and homosexuality with the history of homosexuality.<a href="#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a> In the case of Foucault, he objects to readings of Foucault's <em>History of Sexuality</em> that invoke Foucault's interest in sadomasochistic practices in order either to defend or to discredit his work, and he criticizes me for letting liberal critics "off the hook by creating the authentic connection of a hagiography that excludes them from the possibility of comprehending." He goes on to say that "the problem with all these connections (between S/M and life) is that they reduce the challenge of Foucault's thought to a reaction to a specific practice rather than using a reaction to a practice to test our ability to accommodate a way of thinking." (Loesberg's own tendency to characterize my approach to Foucault and to gay history as narrowly political rather than as philosophical or scholarly seems to me reductive in just this way.) Loesberg clearly has an investment in this topic: he wants to be right there, in the front lines of the battle, on Omaha Beach, but he thinks he's too late to make it. He comforts himself for not being an authentic warrior by constructing from his very inauthenticity a passport to philosophy, if not to Normandy, one which has (according to him) Foucault's authenticating stamp on it. I do sympathize with him, in fact: working occasionally as a man in feminism, I too have experienced the masochistic joys and epistemic benefits of inauthenticity, of being necessarily and irredeemably the wrong man in the wrong place.<a href="#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a></p></li><li><p>The problem is that Loesberg isn't willing to interrogate the nature of his own investment in The Good Cause beyond simply declaring it. Much less is he willing to claim it and own it. What his handwringing amounts to is a refusal to recognize that in fact he has no "hedgerow envy": there is no detachment here, no belatedness at the scene of battle. Loesberg is passionately engaged, in his fashion. He is already implicated in the history and theory of homosexuality, but he is not willing to explore (indeed, he is almost unwilling to name) his own implication in it as a heterosexual postmodernist, except by entitling his interest, defensively, "philosophy." Thus, his apologetic, self-conscious, abashed, but ultimately triumphal claim to join the party ends up looking too much like what it had sincerely wanted to avoid: namely, an assertion of heterosexual (philosophical) privilege. But, really, as all the world knows, identification is a solvent of identity. There is room in gay history for all sorts of people, and the history of sexuality matters to many of us for many sorts of reasons. Identifying, claiming, and knowingly mobilizing those reasons shouldn't be such a scary business. Nor should it be necessary to make other people pay for one's own lack of the "correct" identitarian or scholarly qualifications, for one's loss of a sense of entitlement. Come on, Loesberg and other victims of hedgerow envy: <em>encore un effort pour &#234;tre historiens</em>!</p></li><li><p>Richard Sha also wants to be me. At least he reworks bits of my prose into his own text, more as a series of in-jokes addressed to me, or so I presume, than as winks at the reader.<a href="#9">[9]</a><a name="back9"> </a> But he has a larger point to make: "alterity has become a post-modern version of objectivity. By that I mean that whereas under objectivity, historians could rely upon an historical object independent of the subject who wants it to become an historical object&#8212;a position that can now seem naive&#8212;our recent historicist self-consciousness that there are no innocent objects of historical inquiry has meant that alterity now takes on the possibility of distance between subject and historical object without bringing with it objectivity's naive baggage. Our alterities are calculated." That criticism seems to me to be very astute and far-reaching. It is quite canny of Sha to notice the way that the category of "alterity" can function in the history of sexuality as a badge of honor, a test of rigor, a guarantee of objectivity. So his criticism of the function of alterity seems well-founded. But I'm not sure it represents a valid criticism of me.</p></li><li><p>In fact, I should have thought that Sha, in framing his critique of the place of alterity in current histories of sexuality, would have numbered me among his allies instead of his targets. What I had singled out as "priggish" about "my [earlier] insistence on the alterity of the Greeks, about my [former] effort to get historians of sexuality to adhere unfailingly to neat, categorical, air-tight distinctions between ancient paederasty and modern homosexuality," after all, was precisely the tendency to dictate the proper uses of alterity, to identify a historian's dedication to alterity with objectivity, rigor, resistance to pleasure, and intellectual virtue (<i>How to do</i>, 14). When I called my earlier attitude "priggish," what I meant was that there was something excessively strict, doctrinaire, righteous, superior, even schoolmarmish about my desire to prescribe to students of the past what sort of pleasure they were entitled to find in the archive, and how they might connect pleasure with truth. In undertaking a public auto-critique, I intended to acknowledge that the history of sexuality allows for multiple sites of identification with the past, and that it is not the historian's job to decide whether others should get off by seeing themselves reflected in the surviving record of antiquity or by discovering strange and exotic historical creatures beyond the horizons of their own cultural imagination. I clearly stated my own preference for a historicist approach, and I also tried to specify the reasons as well as the personal (erotic, ethical) investments that lay behind that preference. But I also recognized, in the end, that "a historicist approach to sexuality needs to be argued for as a preference, not insisted upon as a truth" (23). So much, I would have thought, for alterity as objectivity. Sha quotes this last remark of mine, rather skeptically, but he discounts it, as if he thought I didn't really mean it.</p></li><li><p>To be sure, I do think there are some cognitive advantages for historical understanding in attending to and even emphasizing alterity. I don't deny that for a moment. But to speak of "cognitive advantages for historical understanding" is to open up the category of "historical understanding" to further negotiation and specification, to allow for an ongoing discussion of what constitutes such an understanding, what kind of understanding we seek when we undertake any particular project of historical analysis, how that work is carried out, within what sort of intellectual and political and institutional horizons it is inscribed, who wants it and for what reasons. My attachment to alterity therefore has little to do with a notion of historical objectivity as a kind of permanent court of last appeal sitting in perpetual session to judge the rightness or wrongness of historical statements. My own belief is that my pragmatist understanding of the value of alterity is consistent with my pragmatist notion of objectivity&#8212;with an alternative view of what constitutes objectivity within the realm of historical practice. Such a revisionist notion of objectivity is in any case far removed, I think, from Sha's somewhat punitive, positivistic understanding of "objectivity."</p></li><li><p>Sha writes, "Just as imposing our notions of sexuality onto the Greeks leads to blindnesses, so too does insisting that the Greeks were absolutely other." I agree. Did I not urge, after all, that "a sensitivity to difference should not lead to the ghettoization or exotification of the Other, to an othering of the Other as an embodiment of difference itself"? (17). I rather thought that by making an explicit defense of historicism; by stating my preference for an approach to the past that valued, without fixating singlemindedly on, its alterity; by articulating the reasons for my preference; and by emphasizing that preference <em>as</em> a preference&#8212;and not as a truth or a law or a method or a virtue or an imperative: I thought that by doing all those things I had opposed the very fetishizing of alterity of which Sha now accuses me. I don't maintain that the Greeks were "absolutely other." Indeed, my hermeneutic principles, which insist that any notion of alterity is inevitably determined by reference to the subject who constructs it and thus by reference to our present, forbid me to imagine, let alone to lobby for, any such transcendental object of historical knowledge and desire. Already in my 1990 book, <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,</em> I inveighed against what I called "a kind of ethnocentrism in reverse, an insistence on the absolute otherness of the Greeks, . . . an ethnographic narcissism as old as Herodotus&#8212;a tendency to dwell only on those features of alien cultures that impress us as diverging in interesting ways from 'our own'" (60). And in <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em> I argued that we cannot reconstitute the otherness of the Greeks "by an insistent methodological suspension of modern categories, by an austerely historicist determination to identify and bracket our own ideological presuppositions so as to describe earlier phenomena in all their irreducible cultural specificity and time-bound purity" (107).</p></li><li><p>It is Sha who dreams of an otherness that would be really, truly, objectively Other:</p><blockquote>On the one hand, Halperin wants to think outside of our present concept of orientation. On the other hand, he makes orientation his vantage point for establishing the alterity of Ancient Greek sexuality. His choice of orientation as the vantage point for gauging the alterity of the Greeks has the unintended effect of anchoring modern sexual categories in the ontology of history. One could easily imagine other ways of thinking about alterity: for example, by examining how different cultures cope with the elasticity and excessiveness of desire, orientation thus becomes a strategy for dealing with&#8212;for tempering&#8212;the mobility of desire just as gender is one means of discouraging excess desire in Ancient Greece. Such a reimagining demands that we truly think outside of orientation by insisting upon its ideological work without running the danger of reifying orientation as a vantage point from which to gauge alterity.</blockquote></li><li><p>And so he is upset with me because he suspects that I may have palmed off on him an alterity that is not the genuine article. As the passage quoted above makes clear, he thinks he has caught my version of alterity in the act of smuggling in contemporary identities in the guise of otherness, just as he has caught me in the act of "anchoring modern sexual categories in the ontology of history" and "reifying orientation as a vantage point from which to gauge alterity." But I made no secret of it. That is exactly what I set out to do. There is no "unintended effect" here. My insistence on approaching the history of sexuality from within the cultural and sexual horizons of my own location is the very thing that safeguards the version of alterity I desire from ever being or claiming to be "absolutely other." Contrary to what Sha claims, I don't try, as a historian, to step out of my own world, to escape my own culture, and I don't dream of a "view from nowhere."<a href="#10">[10]</a><a name="back10"> </a> I am happy to inhabit the contradictions of my own existence.</p></li><li><p>In other words, Sha is quite right when he claims that I want both to think outside modern sexual categories and to acknowledge them as framing my historical inquiries&#8212;when he speaks of "Halperin's resistance to orientation, a resistance that simultaneously tries to step outside of it and to enshrine it as a vantage point." That is what I think historians of sexuality need to do. After all, to be a historian of sexuality is necessarily to inhabit multiple temporalities: as a sexual subject oneself, one is bound to contemporary sexuality in an instinctive and unarguable way, but as a historian one engages in the thought-experiment of living in a different world. To be a historian of sexuality is therefore to give oneself over to an endlessly stereoscopic sort of vision: it is to see the world simultaneously as it makes sense to oneself, at a very visceral level, and as it makes sense of the documented experiences of others. It is to recognize that modern sexual concepts compel belief with a force unlike that of any other philosophical concepts, while also recognizing that they do not determine the totality of one's cognition or prevent one from entering imaginatively into other people's experiences of desire and pleasure. The elusive but seductive goal of this intellectual <em>ascesis</em> is to turn us into anthropologists of our own culture and historians of our own present.</p></li><li><p>Now, no one said that any of this was going to be easy, that it would be free from contradiction and paradox, that it would produce some stable and lasting scholarly dispensation, that it would safeguard us from noxious effects and consequences, that it would place in our hands some surefire disciplinary method or set us on the royal road to historical objectivity. But that's precisely what makes it interesting&#8212;and, in my view at least, preferable to the alternatives.<br/></p></li></ol></div>
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<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Works Cited</h4><p class="hang" align="left">Crandall, Emma. "Do the Right Thing: Lesbian Honor, Butch Codes, and Historical Ethics. An Autobiographical Exercise in Futility." Unpublished.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Davidson, Arnold I. "Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought." <em>Foucault and the Writing of History</em>. Ed. Jan Goldstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994. 63-80, 266-71.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Elfenbein, Andrew. <em>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</em>. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Eribon, Didier. <em>R&eacute;flexions sur la question gay</em>. Paris: Fayard, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <i>Insult and the Making of the Gay Self</i>. Trans. Michael Lucey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Halperin, David M. "Homosexuality&rsquo;s Closet." <em>Michigan Quarterly Review</em>, 41.1 (Winter 2002). 21-54.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and other essays on Greek Love</em>. New York: Routledge, 1990.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Hitchcock, Tim. <em>English Sexualities, 1700-1800</em>. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin&rsquo;s Press, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England." <em>History Workshop Journal</em>, 41 (1996). 73-90.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Jackson, Earl, Jr. Review of Richlin. <em>Bryn Mawr Classical Review</em>, 3 (1992). 387-96.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Miller, D. A. <em>Place for Us [Essay on the Broadway Musical]</em>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Nagel, Thomas. <em>The View from Nowhere</em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Richlin, Amy. <em>Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome</em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the &lsquo;Political Economy&rsquo; of Sex." <em>Toward an Anthropology of Women</em>. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157-210.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Traub, Valerie. <em>The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.</p></div>
<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Notes</h4><p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> See Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," and Traub, <em>The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England</em>.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> See, especially, "Homosexuality's Closet."<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> For a brilliant attempt to understand lesbianism as a cultural form in just these terms, see Crandall, "Do the Right Thing."<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Mudge might have acknowledged in this connection the work of Tim Hitchcock, particularly Hitchcock's "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England" and the introduction to his edited collection, <em>English Sexualities, 1700-1800</em>.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> Mudge writes: "Feminist commentators, on the other hand, read 'pornography' as the quintessence of patriarchal oppression, objecting to sexualized violence and demeaning stereotypes. Both groups [i.e., traditional historians and feminist critics] treat 'pornography' as a monolithic discourse, generally unspecified as to text or image and uniformly self-evident both in purpose and affect. Both assume that the word will remain a pejorative and that the category it names is transhistorical in nature. Thinking of 'pornography' first and foremost as an act of the imagination, however, allows for a better understanding of pornography's satiric entanglements within the larger cultural field, for a more nuanced reading of its textual or visual strategies, and for a greater appreciation of its historical development." Mudge might have included Richlin's <em>Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome</em> among his examples of this transhistorical tendency in feminist criticism: for a critique of that collection along precisely these lines, see the review by Jackson. Gayle Rubin demonstrated long ago, in "The Traffic in Women," that it is possible to treat forms of female oppression as both universal and constructed: the enduring nature of an oppressive structure therefore provides no justification for essentializing it.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> The third chapter of <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em> is entitled "Historicizing the Subject of Desire."<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> It is curious in this context that Loesberg doesn't refer the reader to some of the most important scholarship on the connections between Foucault's thinking about sexuality and his personal life: see especially Davidson, "Ethics as Ascetics," and the third part of Eribon, <em>R&#233;flexions sur la question gay</em>.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> See, for example, "Why is Diotima a Woman?" in <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality</em>, 113-151, 190-211.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> For example, Sha's "acting like a tourist in the archive" echoes my "behaves, in effect, like tourists in the archives" (<em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>, 60); similarly, his "One thing is for sure: the Greeks did not define their sexual differences to enable the 'disintegration of our own concepts'" echoes my "the one thing about the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em> that we can be sure of is that they did not wonder what it was like to be the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em>" (ibid., 21).<br/><a href="#back9">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> Cf. Nagel, <em>The View from Nowhere</em>.<br/><a href="#back10">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><a name="bottom"> </a></p></div><div class="notesWorks"><p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> See Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," and Traub, <em>The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England</em>.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> See, especially, "Homosexuality's Closet."<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> For a brilliant attempt to understand lesbianism as a cultural form in just these terms, see Crandall, "Do the Right Thing."<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Mudge might have acknowledged in this connection the work of Tim Hitchcock, particularly Hitchcock's "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England" and the introduction to his edited collection, <em>English Sexualities, 1700-1800</em>.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> Mudge writes: "Feminist commentators, on the other hand, read 'pornography' as the quintessence of patriarchal oppression, objecting to sexualized violence and demeaning stereotypes. Both groups [i.e., traditional historians and feminist critics] treat 'pornography' as a monolithic discourse, generally unspecified as to text or image and uniformly self-evident both in purpose and affect. Both assume that the word will remain a pejorative and that the category it names is transhistorical in nature. Thinking of 'pornography' first and foremost as an act of the imagination, however, allows for a better understanding of pornography's satiric entanglements within the larger cultural field, for a more nuanced reading of its textual or visual strategies, and for a greater appreciation of its historical development." Mudge might have included Richlin's <em>Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome</em> among his examples of this transhistorical tendency in feminist criticism: for a critique of that collection along precisely these lines, see the review by Jackson. Gayle Rubin demonstrated long ago, in "The Traffic in Women," that it is possible to treat forms of female oppression as both universal and constructed: the enduring nature of an oppressive structure therefore provides no justification for essentializing it.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> The third chapter of <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em> is entitled "Historicizing the Subject of Desire."<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> It is curious in this context that Loesberg doesn't refer the reader to some of the most important scholarship on the connections between Foucault's thinking about sexuality and his personal life: see especially Davidson, "Ethics as Ascetics," and the third part of Eribon, <em>R&#233;flexions sur la question gay</em>.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> See, for example, "Why is Diotima a Woman?" in <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality</em>, 113-151, 190-211.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> For example, Sha's "acting like a tourist in the archive" echoes my "behaves, in effect, like tourists in the archives" (<em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>, 60); similarly, his "One thing is for sure: the Greeks did not define their sexual differences to enable the 'disintegration of our own concepts'" echoes my "the one thing about the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em> that we can be sure of is that they did not wonder what it was like to be the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em>" (ibid., 21).<br/><a href="#back9">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> Cf. Nagel, <em>The View from Nowhere</em>.<br/><a href="#back10">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><a name="bottom"> </a></p></div></div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/halperin-david-m">Halperin, David M.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/503" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">desire</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/643" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">feminism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1990" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">history of sexuality</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/bradford-keyes-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Keyes Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/valerie-traub" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Valerie Traub</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/gayle-rubin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gayle Rubin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-loesberg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan Loesberg</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/greece" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Greece</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/michigan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michigan</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:28 +0000rc-admin14939 at http://www.rc.umd.eduAbstractshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/abstracts.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded">
<div style="text-align: center">
<h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2>
</div>
<h3 style="text-align: center">Abstracts</h3>
<p style="text-align: center" class="smalltext"><a href="#sha">Richard C. Sha</a> | <a href="#loesberg">Jonathan Loesberg</a> | <a href="#fay">Elizabeth Fay</a> | <a href="#heydt">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</a> | <a href="#lanser">Susan S. Lanser</a> | <a href="#mudge">Bradford K. Mudge</a> | <a href="#oquinn">Daniel O'Quinn</a> | <a href="#halperin">David M. Halperin</a> | <a href="#elfenbein">Andrew Elfenbein</a></p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="sha" id="sha"> </a>Richard C. Sha,</b> "The Use and Abuse of Alterity: David Halperin and Percy Shelley on Ancient Greek Sexuality"</p>
<p style="text-align: left">Through a comparison of Percy Shelley's understanding of the alterity of Ancient Greek Sex with David Halperin's, Sha argues that alterity functions on the one hand to insist upon the otherness of Greek sex, and, on the other hand, to declare one's self-consciousness about that otherness. Because self-consciousness and otherness are necessarily at odds, alterity has become a post-modern form of objectivity. Once one declares one's allegiances, one is free to make the other other.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/sha/sha.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="loesberg" id="loesberg"> </a>Jonathan Loesberg,</b> "Foucault and the Hedgerow History of Sexuality"</p>
<p style="text-align: left">This article argues that what it calls hedgerow envy, a generalized sense of having a non-historical stake in the meaning of a historical narrative&#8212;which is part of its inauthenticity and its theory&#8212;is also a central part of how Foucault's history works, as well as the debates his history has incited and played a part in over the historical meaning of sexuality and homosexuality.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/loesberg/loesberg.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="fay" id="fay"> </a> Elizabeth Fay</b>, "Framing Romantic Dress: Mary Robinson, Princess Caroline and the Sex/Text"</p>
<p style="text-align: left">Two Romantic Period women who were accustomed to public appearances used the semiotic play provided by deliberate dress choices to create public interpretations of their legible bodies: Mary Robinson and Princess Caroline. While Robinson carefully crafted her public image, she also varied it with fashionable rapidity so that she was always in the public eye due to her literal mobility among public spaces and her identity mobility. This flexible form of role playing allowed Robinson to adjust her public image as necessary. When the less adept Caroline of Brunswick attempted to create similar identity play for herself, the outcome was successful or disastrous in public opinion depending on her political backers. Caroline's body was pre-read through political screens, and unlike Robinson's careful identity managing, Caroline's costuming was directed at fighting or abetting such screens.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/fay/fay.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="heydt" id="heydt"> </a>Jillian Heydt-Stevenson,</b> "Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business": Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's Juvenilia<a href="javascript:openFootnote('heydt_notes.html#1')"> </a></p>
<p style="text-align: left">Austen's Juvenilia has generally been seen as the youthful expression of a nascent talent, a gathering of short and often fragmentary pieces that are typically nonsensical or bizarre, but infused throughout with her comic genius. This essay argues that this body of work, taken as a whole, has an intellectual unity and is informed by a consistent thread of appetitive excess that functions as a powerful critique of the kinds of constraints late 18th-century society imposed on young women. The heroines of the Juvenilia, in their often shocking or even illegal pursuit of love, food, drink, and material objects, not only display the power of a range of female desire, they also expose just what Austen's society was afraid of and sought to silence. Historical sources as well as psychoanalytic and feminist theory help us understand how Austen's counter-narratives expose the pervasiveness of repression and how powerful the female resistance to that denial could be, turning the kinds of violence society intends against women back out against the world. The mature Austen continues to explore these themes, even if in a less manic and more measured way.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/heydt/heydt.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="lanser" id="lanser"> </a>Susan S. Lanser,</b> "Put to the Blush: Romantic Irregularities and Sapphic Tropes"</p>
<p style="text-align: left">Without arguing for direct influence, this essay reads a group of English poems as an implicit Romantic conversation that advances different models of sapphic sublimity in a troplogical contest about the nature and place of female affinities. The essay begins by revisiting the exclusion of "Christabel" from the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>, and goes on to discuss the implicit dialogue enacted through William Wordsworth's sonnet to the "Ladies of Llangollen" and Dorothy Wordsworth's poem "Irregular Verses." The essay concludes with a look at the metrical practices of these poems and of Shelley's "Rosalind and Helen," as a way to explore the ambivalences and ambiguities in Romantic configurations of female same-sex desire.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/lanser/lanser.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="mudge" id="mudge"> </a>Bradford K. Mudge,</b> "How to Do the History of Pornography: Romantic Sexuality and its Field of Vision"<a href="javascript:openFootnote('mudge_notes.html#*')"> </a></p>
<p style="text-align: left">This essay takes as its subject both the sexual body as represented in British romantic fiction and the imagination (is it "literary" or "pornographic"?) that was required to envision that body as a narrative event. Situated after the high watermark of "libertine literature" in the 1740s and 50s, but before the emergence of "pornography" proper in the 1830s and 40s, romantic fiction inherited the eighteenth century's conflicted attitudes about novelistic pleasure but was itself produced in a cultural marketplace that had not yet fixed and formulated the discursive opposition between "literature" and "pornography." The essay discusses these issues in dialogue with the historical and sexological discourse of Michel Foucault in <i>The History of Sexuality</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/mudge/mudge.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="oquinn" id="oquinn"> </a>Daniel O'Quinn</b>, "The State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desire"</p>
<p style="text-align: left">The essay explores the notion of masochist nationalism through a reading of a brief passage in Equiano's <i>Interesting Narrative</i> in which Equiano engages with a young Musquito man named George. Equiano's attempt to convert George is tied to a mutual reading of Fox's <i>Book of Martyrs</i> which posits a community of aggrieved souls who will enact vengeance on the slave holders and on those who sanction slavery. The argument pays particular attention to how Equiano figures George in a complex economy of humiliation and revenge. This revenge becomes highly sexualized when Equiano shifts his allusions from Fox's <i>Book of Martyrs</i> to <i>The Book of Judges</i>. From this point onward Equiano's text is thoroughly involved in a series of rape fantasies which have important nationalist implications. Ultimately, the essay suggests that Equiano's most radical gesture in this scene is to stage politics from the ground of the object, but it also demonstrates how such a politics is susceptible to unforeseen consequences.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/oquinn/oquinn.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="halperin" id="halperin"> </a>David M. Halperin,</b> "'That Obscure Object of Historical Desire'"</p>
<p style="text-align: left">In his essay, Halperin responds to the essays collected in this issue, many of which respond to his book <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i>, touching upon the history of sexuality, homosexuality, subjectivity, and desire, especially as reflected in the sexual discourse of Michel Foucault.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/halperin/halperin.html">[go to essay]</a>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="elfenbein" id="elfenbein"> </a>Andrew Elfenbein,</b> "Romantic Loves: A Response to <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i>"</p>
<p style="text-align: left">Elfenbein's essay responds to the essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> by considering their usefulness in response to the work of Michel Foucault. He examines how each essay continues or complicates Foucault's ideas in <i>The History of Sexuality</i>. He examines Bradford Mudge's essay in terms of the agency of the novel, and the essays by Susan Lanser and Daniel O'Quinn in terms of coding. He discusses female agency in the essays by Elizabeth Fay and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson. For the essays by Richard Sha and Jonathan Loesberg, he examines how they treat identity and difference in relation to sexuality. He concludes by discussing the concept of love in Romanticism.</p>
<p style="text-align: left">
<a href="/praxis/sexuality/elfenbein/elfenbein.html">[go to essay]</a>
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</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/jillian-heydt-stevenson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/bradford-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/daniel-j-oquinn-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Daniel J. O&#039;Quinn</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jillian-heydt-stevenson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jane-austen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Austen</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/elizabeth-fay" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Elizabeth Fay</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-loesberg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan Loesberg</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:26 +0000rc-admin14932 at http://www.rc.umd.eduRomantic Loves: A Response to Historicizing Romantic Sexualityhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/elfenbein/elfenbein.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div id="container"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>Romantic Loves: A Response to <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i></h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">This essay responds to the essays in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_ by considering their usefulness in response to Michel Foucault. The author examines how each essay continues or complicates Foucault's ideas in _The History of Sexuality_. The author concludes by discussing the concept of love in Romanticism. This essay appears in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><ol><li><p>In Volume I of <i>The History of Sexuality</i>, Foucault argues that sex should be treated not as a matter of individual choice but as part of "the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure":</p><blockquote>The central issue . . . is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact," the way in which sex is "put into discourse." (11)</blockquote><p>The "central issue" here has nothing to do with how anyone had sex. Foucault agrees with the most startling statement in Percy Shelley's "Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love": "The act itself is nothing" (221). This is an odd dismissal. One might counter that the act is rather important, and deserves careful historical attention. Foucault, however, claims that "sex" is merely "an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality" (155). His larger point is to avoid the perceived trap of elevating sex to "the side of reality," while demoting sexuality merely to "confused ideas and illusions" (15).</p></li><li><p>Since Foucault sees little purpose in writing a history of sex acts, he is more concerned to counter the assumption that he will present a victorious history of sexual repression (bad) and sexual liberation (good). Such a history would beg the question he wishes to ask, which is how sex came to be understood as repressing or liberating at all. The important history of sexuality for Foucault lies not in the discourse itself so much as in the conditions that enabled it. What counts is not approving or disapproving of particular statements, but grasping the larger system that allowed sex to enter language at all: why sex was worth talking about, who talked about it, what institutions undergirded them, and how language about sex was recorded and disseminated. Foucault's position requires understanding language about sexuality only in relational terms, insofar as any given piece of discourse takes its place within a larger web of statements about sexuality.<a href="#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a></p></li><li><p>For literary critics, this is hardly news: Foucault's arguments are nothing if not familiar. Yet the familiarity of his arguments at a theoretical level masks the difficulty that literary critics have had in actually carrying forward Foucault's project. For the most part, the essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> manifest a somewhat oblique relation to Foucault, despite the citation of his work. In part, as Jonathan Loesberg argues in his essay, this may have occurred because a rather minor part of <i>The History of Sexuality</i>, the supposed "invention" of the homosexual, has bulked so large in the reception of Foucault that it has come to stand for the whole. Engaging Foucault may not seem very interesting when, too often, it has come down to nothing more than agreeing or disagreeing with his dates.<a href="#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a> Furthermore, for all of Foucault's supposed omnipresence, much of the historical spadework required to place literary works in relation to a larger discursive network about sexuality remains unfinished. Decades after the publication of Foucault's work, scholars of British studies have nothing like even a fragmentary account of factors that he suggests are central to a history of sexuality. We do have some pieces, such as examinations of developments in science and medicine, political rhetoric, and literature.<a href="#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> But other areas of potentially equal interest remain relatively untouched, such as the discourse of religion (sermons, tracts, biblical commentaries) or the codes of military conduct (the role of sexual humiliation in wartime, as at the siege of Badajoz during the Peninsular campaign). Nor has anyone put the pieces together to create even a tentative map of the deployment of sexuality across institutions, knowledges, and practices. The citation of Foucault's text has substituted for the realization of his project.</p></li><li><p>Beyond the daunting range of knowledge that would be required for a full Foucauldian analysis, disciplinary practices within literary criticism preserve many categories that Foucault wished to question. In particular, the genre of literary critical essay still bases itself primarily around the reading of individual texts, typically understood as the product of an intending author who has expressed himself or herself in them. It has proven much easier to criticize the assumptions of this mode than to provide workable alternatives to it. Essays or books that draw on historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic theories designed to unsettle the sovereignty of the intending author often do less to unsettle it than to find ways of coexisting uneasily and oxymoronically beside it.</p></li><li><p>For literary critics, the individualism of the artistic self privileged by the conventions of disciplinary analysis chimes with the individualism that, according to Foucault, is the triumph of sexuality's regime: "So it is that all the world's enigmas appear frivolous to us compared to this secret, minuscule in each of us, but of a density that makes it more serious than any other" (156). One result is that he cautions against thinking that "we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power" when we actually are only "fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected" (157). Although Foucault does not make the connection explicitly, one result of this individualism is that understanding ourselves in terms of a relational web of power becomes extremely difficult: the deployment of sexuality locates our identity entirely "in" us. Literary critics appropriate this individualism when they read texts as expressing, encoding, or repressing a sexualized self that belongs either to the biographical author or to the author as figure for a cultural moment.</p></li><li><p>The result tends to reinstall as givens the categories that Foucault unsettled. Close reading alone, no matter how historically situated, cannot describe just what kind of power literature <i>qua</i> literature had within the larger network of discourses that deployed sexuality during the Romantic period.<a href="#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a> Unfortunately, Foucault's key concept for battling the individualizing power of sexuality, "power," is so all-encompassing that it offers only limited help. Foucauldian power is a site of "multiple and mobile . . . relations" (98) undergoing such constant transformation that they virtually defy analysis. It seems as if Foucault wants the sheer complexity of his image of power to be a guarantee of its truth.<a href="#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a>Reading Foucault's description, it can feel as if his concept of power is less a blueprint meant to be realized in a concrete analysis than a point-by-point negation of an older, inadequate model.</p></li><li><p>The great value of the essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> is to provide some badly needed specificity about the forms of agency that sexuality might take during the Romantic period, as an alternative to Foucault's all-devouring "power." Even as Foucault insists on the omnipresence of power, he looks to the most obvious sites for its deployment, such as religious confession and the medicalization of sexuality. The essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> provide a much better guide to the multiplication of sexualities by looking at such sites as the preface, the novel, poetic form, an abolitionist tract, women's clothes, and juvenilia. In what follows, I treat the essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> with an avowed bias: imagining how they might fit into a larger Foucauldian project by discussing the kinds of agency associated with each of these sites.</p></li><li><p>Bradford Mudge's essay examines "how sexual bodies are represented in romantic fiction" (8). After describing voyeurism in Cleland's <i>Fanny Hill</i>, he turns to Lewis's <i>The Monk</i>, in which voyeurism reveals not the "real" body as described by Cleland but the unobtainable body of male fantasy, and Austen's <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, in which bodily pleasure is made subservient to "love, marriage, and family." In linking his work to Foucault, Mudge notes that <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>foreshadows and encapsulates Foucault's "entire argument," because Foucault "insists" that sexuality "coheres in one central purpose"; this purpose, according to Foucault, is that of constituting "a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative." Yet Mudge seems more convinced of this point than Foucault does; immediately after the passage that Mudge quotes, Foucault writes, "I still do not know whether this is the ultimate objective" (37). Indeed, what Mudge claims to be Foucault's basic argument looks more like Foucault's self-parody of his own repressive hypothesis, which is why he quickly backtracks from it. In the larger context of <i>The History of Sexuality</i>, Foucault's argument is not that sexuality is politically conservative; indeed, he spends considerable time criticizing historiography that imagines power in terms of a one-sided hierarchy of oppression implied by a phrase like "politically conservative." Instead, he explains how modern discourses of sexuality work through "multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of 'perversities'" (37).</p></li><li><p>The relevance of Foucault for Mudge's argument is less that <i>The History of Sexuality</i> recapitulates Jane Austen but that Foucault specifies the question of how literature acted as a vehicle of multiplication: how did reading fictional stories about sex come to be as important as doing it? It is tempting for literary critics to conceive the answer chiefly in terms of representation: because novels depicted sexualized behavior, they were obviously an instrument shaping the deployment of sexuality. Yet Foucault suggests that an analysis of fiction's agency needs to do more, by engaging the dynamics of reception in terms of "the institutions which prompt people to speak about [sexuality] and which store and distribute the things that are said."</p></li><li><p>For scholars of the Romantic novel, answering this question might include examining the intersection between the social institution of the family and the economic apparatus of fiction marketing and production. The point is not simply that novels represented sexuality, but that the presence of novels changed in important ways the sexual dynamics of the family: novels invaded the household; defined, consolidated, or challenged relations between family members; marked living spaces as appropriate or inappropriate for reading; were kept, returned, or junked; and became subjects of conversation. The work of William St. Clair in <i>The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period</i> might provide a telling starting-place for a more complete investigation of the novel as a particular site for the multiplication of sexualities during this period.</p></li><li><p>The essays of Susan Lanser and Daniel O'Quinn foreground one of the most important forms of agency in the history of sexuality, the code. Foucault describes the code in terms of "the method of interpretation" central to <i>scientia sexualis</i>, in which "the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said" (66). Sexuality is the hidden truth that can be made visible only with the help of the expert interpreter. With the right tools, even seemingly innocent texts can be made to confess, to yield up their secrets to decipherment.</p></li><li><p>In Lanser's essay, lesbianism is the mystery encoded by poetic form; the skilled interpreter is able to unwrap the mystery by close attention to "sapphic tropes": "The transgressive potential of female friendship . . . urged the inscription of female intimacies into the ambiguities of figuration." This essay's detailed foregrounding of figuration and metrics demonstrates that poetic language has resources available to it for encoding that are not available anywhere else. Lanser's essay valuably helps to explain some of literature's peculiar place in the deployment of sexuality because of its ability to install sexuality not only in semantic meaning but also in extrasemantic aspects of language.</p></li><li><p>For O'Quinn, decoding involves interpreting the competing pressures of abolitionist discourse between Christian masochism and the history of British imperialism. His essay looks closely at an odd scene of prayer in Olaudah Equiano's <i>Interesting Narrative</i>. The gap between what one might expect of such a scene and what Equiano provides leads O'Quinn to read the episode as a moment of Christianized masochism, in which Equiano "is . . . acting his sexual degradation." This abasement is "necessary for Equiano's masochistic identification with the invisible church," an identification that the essay develops by examining Equiano's reference to the "Sons of Belial" in terms of its Biblical source in Judges 19.</p></li><li><p>The major achievements of O'Quinn's essay lie in foregrounding abolition and the slave trade as critical sites for the deployment of sexuality during the Romantic period, and in emphasizing the role of Christian rhetoric in mediating this deployment. Moreover, O'Quinn importantly underscores the value of masochism in forging a nexus between Christianity, imperialism, and the slave trade. Yet the status of masochism fluctuates in the essay between a rhetoric of eighteenth-century dissent strategically deployed by Equiano and something closer to a psychological neurosis, as described by Reik and Silverman. The more that O'Quinn's essay moves toward decoding, the more masochism becomes the essence of Equiano's being, what Foucault describes as "a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage" (59).</p></li><li><p>For example, Equiano tells us that George "would get up on purpose to go to prayer with [him], without any other clothes than his shirt." O'Quinn's prioritization of masochism leads him to read this scene in terms of Equiano's sexual abasement, in which George serves as Equiano's "necessary tormentor." Yet positing masochism as the truth that must be extracted from this scene leads O'Quinn to sidestep the fact that Equiano's language does not obviously reveal masochistic torment. On the contrary, when Equiano describes George's enthusiasm for prayer, Equiano notes, in the passage quoted by O'Quinn, "I was well pleased at this, and took great delight in him, and used much supplication to God for his conversion." One might argue that such a statement is a reaction formation, a defense against desire, but doing so reinscribes the sexualized essence that Foucault wished to question. (O'Quinn argues for something like such a reaction formation later in his essay when he describes a "textual repression in which physical and quasi-anthropological observations are used to regulate the power of emotion elicited by rememorative passages that are too volatile to handle.") Yet Equiano's language focuses less on his sense of threat and powerlessness than on his somewhat condescending amusement at George's naivete and his pleasure at his own power over George, his ability to "make such progress with this youth." His ultimate failure to convert George may point less to his own need to sustain a masochistic fantasy than to his opportunity to provide a negative example to his audience; they should not be like the "sons of Belial" who ultimately prevent George's conversion, but should be among those who hear the word and bear a good harvest by abolishing the traffic in slaves.</p></li><li><p>Through their investment in decoding, Lanser and O'Quinn both raise questions about the temporality of this mode of agency. Did these figurations have to wait for twenty-first century critics to unlock their ambiguities, or were they available to Georgian readers as well? Both essays seem to assume that they were indeed decipherable to their original readers. If so, they might do more to explain the reading practices whereby readers would have been acclimated to look for sexualized codes, as in the reception of satire. More generally, these essays develop in a way that Foucault does not the effectiveness of the code as a site for the proliferation of sexuality, since codes, like allegories, have a tendency to overwhelm their boundaries. If poetic form is sometimes a code for irregular desires, is it all the time? Does this irregularity apply only to sapphic representations, or to ones between men as well? If Equiano is sometimes occupying the position of Christian masochist, is he doing so all the time? If not, how does one recognize the presence or absence of coded moments? As D. A. Miller has pondered, answering such questions is particularly difficult. Ignoring coded meanings condemns sexuality to invisibility, but searching for them can at times come close to a hostile interrogation, an outing of the text (17-18).</p></li><li><p>Whereas the essays by Lanser and O'Quinn focus on uncovering what the text encodes, those by Fay and Heydt-Stevenson examine more visible rebellions or challenges to a repressive order. In so doing, they seem to disagree strongly with Foucault, who claims that "sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely" (103). Both Fay and Heydt-Stevenson posit female sexuality as just such a stubborn drive, looking for modes of independence and self-expression in the face of restrictive social conditions and hostile censorship. According to Fay, Mary Robinson and Princess Caroline "felt empowered by the radicalism or laxity of their times to tease the borders of expected roles and rules engendering sexual expression"; according to Heydt-Stevenson, "Austen's representations of her heroines' fighting and drinking and lovemaking and thieving . . . offer a language for deciphering the robust, lusty female energy that social rules encrypt or entomb." They both reaffirm the rebellious woman of bourgeois feminist criticism, whose inherent intelligence and dynamism struggle against an oppressive, patriarchal environment.</p></li><li><p>Although these essays eschew Foucauldian positions, they both nevertheless raise important points for a Foucauldian analysis of the Romantic period, especially in relation to women. The association traced by Fay between clothes and female agency offers a telling contrast to what Foucault describes as the interpretive techniques of confession. Whereas some bodies need to be forced to disclose their sexual truths, others, such as those of Robinson and Princess Caroline, become all too easily legible, being reproduced with dizzying rapidity in written descriptions, prints, and satirical drawings. Her essay suggests that the Foucauldian category of <i>scientia sexualis</i> could be provocatively juxtaposed with a very different system of clothes and fashion as modes for producing the sexualized body. Whereas Foucault imagines a body of opinion generated by medical specialists, Fay describes a system created not merely by the British fashion industry, but also by pamphleteers, actors, cartoonists, and society painters. As Fay demonstrates, it is not enough to treat clothes simply as another item within a burgeoning consumer society: clothes had a privileged place within print capitalism's techniques of training the eye. Literary historians should have a particular interest in this use of clothes, given the parallels that historians have noted between the struggle to define literary property and the debates over the ownership of dress design.<a href="#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a></p></li><li><p>Heydt-Stevenson's essay points to what Foucault calls "the tactical polyvalence of discourses" (100): the condescendingly repressive language of the late eighteenth-century conduct books gives rise to the "joyful lawlessness" of Austen's juvenilia. Moreover, Heydt-Stevenson importantly insists that the "abandon" of the juvenilia is not "entirely repressed" in Austen's more mature work. Her essay points to the need for further analysis of the work that the label "juvenilia" performs simultaneously to sexualize and desexualize the narrative of an authorial career. Since the time of Virgil's <i>Eclogues</i>, juvenilia have been associated both with displays of eroticism and with an immature stage of life that the author, thankfully, outgrows in order to engage more "serious" issues. Heydt-Stevenson powerfully demonstrates that the assumptions undergirding this developmental model need serious reconsideration.</p></li><li><p>Richard Sha's essay moves the ground of discussion from particular case studies to the larger theoretical underpinnings of the historiography of sexuality. His essay makes an important intervention not only into scholarship on the Romantic period but also into work on the history of sexuality more generally in its persistent querying of "alterity as the gold standard of history." He pursues this theme through a potent contrast between two thinkers, both "committed to the otherness of Greek sex," but for different reasons. David Halperin's discussion of the pseudo-Lucianic <i>Erotes</i> values alterity as a way of making us "think outside of our present concept of orientation"; Shelley's preface to his translation of <i>The Symposium</i>, according to Sha, uses alterity more conservatively to consign homoeroticism to the Greek past and thereby clear the way for a universally heterosexual modernity. Sha's criticism of the fetishization of alterity is a familiar theme in the history of hermeneutics; Paul Ricoeur, for example, describes the "illusion . . . that puts an end to our collusion with the past and creates a situation comparable to the objectivity of the natural sciences, on the grounds that a loss of familiarity is a break with the contingent" (74). Sha is particularly compelling in his demonstration of how the privileging of alterity encourages a sort of "lite" objectivity, a humanities-friendly version of the (supposed) factual certainty of science.</p></li><li><p>In the service of this objectivity, according to Sha, Halperin ends up portraying the Greeks as even more "other" than they were, at least on the evidence of the <i>Erotes</i>. The differences described by Halperin turn out to be ones of degree rather than kind, though, to be fair to Halperin, the crux of his argument is that difference existed at all. A further question about the <i>Erotes</i> might be not so much about difference as about about generalizability. Both Halperin and Sha suggest that the <i>Erotes</i> is a highly self-conscious dialogue, with two opposing points of view brought into exaggerated contrast. As Halperin writes, it might be thought of as a "passionate debate . . . between someone who eats nothing but vegetables and someone who eats nothing but meat" (99). Given this obvious rhetoricity, what kinds of conclusions can be made about differences either of degree or of kind in light of its questionable generalizability?</p></li><li><p>When Sha turns to Shelley, he reads the homophobia of the "Discourse" somewhat as O'Quinn reads Equiano's <i>Interesting Narrative</i>, partly as a deflection of sexual threat: "Shelley's sense of the otherness of the Greeks may well have deflected attention away from his own homosocial desires." According to Sha, Shelley blames the Greeks' homoeroticism on their degradation of women; since Shelley believes that modernity has improved women's condition, homosexuality should no longer exist. Yet, as Sha notes, this othering quickly breaks down, since Shelley both admits that "gender inequality has not been abolished" and employs essentializing rhetoric to suggest that homosexuality cannot be safely confined to the past.</p></li><li><p>Yet the psychologizing of male sexual threat in this essay, as in O'Quinn's essay, may sidestep some of the text's performative work. The <i>Discourse</i> introduces Shelley's translation of <i>The Symposium</i>, with its gorgeous, rhapsodic account of love between men. Shelley's concern in his preface seems to me to be less to confine homosexuality to the Greeks than to stave off his audience's potential rejection of the whole of <i>The Symposium</i> because of their assumed disgust with Greek homosexuality. Rather than confining homosexuality to the Greek past, Shelley makes an even more peculiar argument. He saves <i>The Symposium</i> for his audience by arguing that Greek homosexuality was not what his audience (at least some of them) might think it was: "I am persuaded that it was totally different from the ridiculous and disgusting conceptions which the vulgar have formed on the subject, at least except among the debased and abandoned of mankind" (222). Class respectability arrives to rescue the Greeks: nice Greek men really did not have anal sex with boys at all; only vulgar ones did, and only vulgar readers now would be crude enough to think otherwise. According to Shelley, respectable Greeks had such a ripe fantasy lives that they did not need penetration at all:</p><blockquote>If we consider the facility with which certain phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of puberty, associated themselves with those images which are the objects of our waking desires; and even that in some persons of an exalted state of sensibility that a similar process may take place in reverie, it will not be difficult to conceive the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions, when the sexual connection cannot exist, to be such as to preclude the necessity of so operose and diabolical a machination as that usually described. (222)</blockquote></li><li><p>Rather than having full-blown anal sex, which Shelley regards not only as "diabolical" but also as just too much trouble ("operose"), Greek men "of an exalted state of sensibility" would ejaculate as one of the "almost involuntary consequences" of being "in the society of a person of surpassing attractions." One might imagine that the sheer messiness of those involuntary consequences could be just as inconvenient as the "operose and diabolical . . . machination" that Shelley deplores, but he seems to imagine that waking wet dreams are essentially more pure because they are involuntary.</p></li><li><p>The othering in Shelley's preface is not between the Greeks and the moderns but between the exalted and the vulgar in both periods; exalted Greeks had waking wet dreams; debased ones had anal sex; exalted modern readers of the Greeks understand the real purity of the love praised in <i>The Symposium</i>; vulgar modern readers insist on a "vulgar imputation" (222) of sodomy. As Sha argues, Shelley's presentation of sexual differences throughout is characterized by a slippage between identity and difference. With regard to Greek love, the slippage centers around the concept of abandonment. On one hand, Shelley claims that if the Greeks had anal sex at all, it was performed only by the "abandoned of mankind." At the same time, he describes the exalted wet dreamers in similar terms: their ejaculations occur when the men are "in a state of abandonment," rather like Heydt-Stevenson's depiction of Austen's juvenilia. What differentiates the abandon of the vulgar from the abandon of the exalted? Shelley's essay reveals "abandon" to be a vexed node in the discourse of sexuality, simultaneously desired and feared.</p></li><li><p>Jonathan Loesberg's essay moves questions of identity and difference to larger issues of gay historiography, without particular reference to the Romantic period. Loesberg spends considerable time in his essay exploring what Ricoeur, after Gadamer, calls the "horizon" of historical understanding (74-75). He names his own variously as "inauthenticity" and "hedgerow envy" and opposes it to those of gay historians, as represented primarily by David Halperin. The concept of the "hedgerow" enables a policing of identity and difference: because Loesberg is not gay, he can claim to have a "non-historical stake in the meaning of a historical narrative." The product of this "non-historical stake" is the conclusion that, even though gay historians are almost guaranteed to get their Foucault wrong, one should not criticize them too much because realizing the "Enlightenment ideals" of Foucault's philosophy "far exceed[s] any details of historical inaccuracy or accidents of political implication." Loesberg uses the aegis of inauthenticity to criticize and not criticize gay historians at the same time. Yet I'm not sure that the concept escapes the condescension that Loesberg wishes to avoid, since the "hedgerow" metaphor still positions gay historians "over there," enmeshed in their naive political biases, while Loesberg is "over here," enjoying the pleasures not of truth but of aestheticized, paradoxical self-consciousness.</p></li><li><p>At the same time, I think that Loesberg is exactly right about oversimplifications of the Foucauldian project, such as the reduction of Foucault either to his biography or to certain quasi-historical positions taken in <i>The History of Sexuality</i>. Yet the alternative to seeing Foucault as a historian may not be to treat him as a classic philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose goals are "to think outside the limits of one's own presumptions." We hardly need Foucault to think outside the limits of our own presumptions: Newtonian physics or Christian ethics, among others, would serve equally well. Foucault's interest lies less in neo-Kantian self-distantiation than in a conceptual framework that allowed a particular topic, the discourse of sexuality, to emerge as fundamental for a knowledge of modernity.<a href="#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a> Given Foucault's own interest in the structures that enable enunciations to gain power, the interest of this framework may reveal less about a philosophical or political project than an academic one: Foucault's work moved sexuality from a minor, virtually unspeakable subject within the humanities to a core concern.</p></li><li><p>By focusing on the aesthetic aspects of Foucault's project, Loesberg avoids the institutional ones. Questions of "hedgerow envy" or "inauthenticity" arise in the realm less of aesthetics and politics than of aesthetics and politics as realized in a particular site: the academy. Although, in <i>Saint Foucaul</i>t, Halperin argues for the importance of Foucault to contemporary gay activism, the activist scene may have shifted between the late 1980s AIDS activists mentioned by Halperin and current GLBT activists (15-18). Today, few GLBT books, articles, speeches, or websites designed for a nonacademic audience make substantive use of anything by Foucault. The meaningful site of Foucault's success and influence is an academic one. The relevant subject positions for Loesberg's analysis may be as much English professor versus English professor as gay versus straight. The important questions opened up by Loesberg's essay involve the convergence of Foucault's influence on the academy and the growth of "GLBT Studies," a discipline that takes Foucault's work as a founding text.The (mis)understandings of Foucault traced by Loesberg have less to do with the constraints of gay identity or politics than with the adaptation of Foucault's work by pre-existing disciplinary structures and practices in the service of creating an academic foothold where none had existed.</p></li><li><p>The question haunting me after I read these essays was whether or not the representation of the sexualized human body should be the only or even inevitable starting-point for a discussion of Romanticism and sexuality. As numerous historians and critics have suggested, the eighteenth century witnessed an increasing consolidation of heterosexual norms in literature, politics, social mores, conduct books, medicine, and so forth, all accompanied by increasing impatience with gender transgressions that could be linked to same-sex eroticism. By the Romantic period, those heterosexualizing energies had been successful&#8212;indeed, possibly too successful. Frederick Beaty's still valuable <i>Light from Heaven</i> details the almost overwhelming heterosexism in Romantic literature. Anna Clark's recent work, in <i>Scandal</i>, has demonstrated the saturation of the Georgian public sphere in heterosexuality; endless idealization of heterosexuality went hand in hand with a seemingly endless capacity to be scandalized. What Foucault describes as a proliferation of sexualities may have looked, at least for the Georgian period, more like a monotonous repetition of one sexuality in every nook and cranny of discourse.</p></li><li><p>In the face of the heterosexual onslaught, Romantic writers did not so much develop a counterdiscourse as explore possibilities lurking within an older discourse, one often overlooked by the historians of sexuality, including Foucault. This was the discourse of love.<a href="#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a> In the Romantic period, sexualities consolidate, but loves proliferate:</p><blockquote>Eternity is in love with the productions of time. (Blake, plate 7, l. 10)<br/><br/>
I love to be reminded of the past, Edward&#8212;whether it be melancholy or gay, I love to recall it&#8212;and you will never offend me by talking of former times. (Austen 118).<br/><br/>
I love a public road: few sights there are / That please me more. (Wordsworth, <i>The Prelude</i>, 12.145-46)<br/><br/>
Here a vain love to passing flowers / Thou gav'st. (Hemans ll. 41-42)<br/><br/>
I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions. (Lamb 972)</blockquote></li><li><p>The Romantics, like earlier writers, continue to direct love at the usual suspects, like God, man, and nature; in addition, "love" could serve as a convenient euphemism for sex in the period. But I am interested in the other possibilities that love made available, especially the Romantic knack for directing love at more out of the way objects. Diedre Lynch, in "Wedded to Books: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists," has already provided an important discussion of perhaps the most important of these: books. My interest is in just what relations these loves have to the history of sexuality as described by Foucault.</p></li><li><p>When Blake claims that "Eternity is in love with the productions of time," one might, with enough ingenuity, imagine how this could be decoded as a moment in "the will to knowledge regarding sex" (65).Yet Blake's use of "love" here proves more cryptic than a Foucauldian reading suggests it should be. Just what kind of love does Eternity have for these productions, and what is the difference between being in love with "the productions" and being in love with "time" itself? Blake uses the metaphor of "love" more to deflect knowledge than to enhance or proliferate it.Rather than permitting "eternity" and the "productions of time" to enter omnipresent regimes of power and knowledge, the love between them seems to shelter them from those regimes, or at least locate them in a place in which those regimes are not especially relevant. Romantic writers are interested in exploring the possibility that love for the productions of time or for being reminded of the past or for old china may have nothing to do with sexuality because it belongs to an entirely different place within the human psyche. They reveal desires that are not so much asexual as extra-sexual, existing next to but not necessarily in cooperation with the networks of power so vividly described by Foucault.</p></li><li><p>These loves, which may have rebelled against the consolidation of heterosexuality, later became a template for the quirky, "abnormal" loves pathologized by the sexologists, in the activity that Foucault calls "a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure" (105). Designating such loves as "perverse" pulls them away from their own discursive context into the orbit of sexuality. At best, in a psychoanalytic scheme, they could be read as sublimation, which, according to Freud, "consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a component or a reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual and must be described as social" (345). Yet there is a fine line between sublimation and neurosis for Freud, especially in relation to artists: "It is well known, indeed, how often artists in particular suffer from a partial inhibition of their efficiency owing to neuroses. Their constitutions probably include a strong capacity for sublimation and a certain degree of laxity in the repressions which are decisive for a conflict" (376).</p></li><li><p>In this Freudian light, Wordsworth's praise of "little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love" appears merely as another episode in the vicissitudes of the libido ("Tintern Abbey" ll. 34-35). Useful as such a decoding might be to later readers, it seems important for Wordsworth in his historical moment to imagine his "acts . . . of love" as something else. At a moment when the public sphere was packed with big, loudly named, embarrassingly trumpeted acts of sexual love on the part of the Prince Regent and others, Wordsworth's poetry seems interested in continuing an entirely different sense of what love might look like. This moment is hardly politically neutral; one might wish to connect it, for example, to the Burkean politics of domesticity as described by Claudia Johnson (198-199). It is, however, a representation of desire that does not mesh obviously with the regimes traced by Foucault, and it is one that Romanticists might want to engage more systematically.</p></li><li><p>Sexuality in Romantic writers can often become formulaic, while love, especially love not directed at people, more fully retains the aura of what Kenneth Burke calls the "concealed offense" (51-60). Foucault's project of tracing the network of knowledge and power around sexuality remains incomplete for the Romantic period. But it may be equally important to acknowledge histories of desire that never quite became part of sexuality during the period. In light of the importance of love, it might be worth asking about the link between bibliomania, as described by Lynch, and the history of pornography, as described by Mudge, so as to examine how the allure of graphic sexual representation interweaves with love for the medium (suspicious books, hidden magazines, exclusive websites). If Sapphic love lurks in eroticized irregularities, as Lanser demonstrates, I am also struck by the association between sapphism during the period and certain marked enthusiasms, as in the gardening of the Ladies of Llangollen and the sculpture of Anne Damer. The erotics of Equiano's relations with others on his ship meshes with his love for the intricacies of navigation, both the literal navigation of the ship and the figurative navigation of the British commercial system. In the cases described by Fay, a love for clothes may not only heighten the sexual allure of bodies, but compete with it, and Heydt-Stevenson suggests that the appetites indulged in Austen's juvenilia may or may not be pure displacements of erotic energy. The presence of love further complicates the play of identity and difference described by Sha by underscoring the potential inadequacy of a history of sexuality that focuses too exclusively on what Shelley calls "the act." It also adds another facet to Loesberg's analysis by inviting us to consider the relationship between aesthetic self-distantiation and love for a particular thinker like Foucault, of the kind that Halperin champions in <i>Saint Foucault</i>. If we imagine love as something other than sexuality by other means, it may offer scholars the chance to return to a seemingly old topic with a new perspective on its agency.<br/></p></li></ol></div>
&#160;
<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Works Cited</h4><p class="hang">Anderson, Amanda. "Victorian Studies and the Two Modernities.&#8221; <i>Victorian Studies</i> 47 (2005): <span class="indent">195-203</span>.</p><p class="hang">Austen, Jane. <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>. Ed. Tony Tanner. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987.</p><p class="hang">Beaty, Frederick L. <i>Light from Heaven: Love in British Romantic Literature.</i> DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971.</p><p class="hang">Blake, William. <i>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.</i><i>The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</i>. Ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. New York: Anchor Press, 1982.</p><p class="hang">Clark, Anna. <i>Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution.</i> Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004.</p><p class="hang">Fletcher, Anthony. <i>Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800</i>. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996.</p><p class="hang">Foucault, Michel. <i>The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language</i>. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993.</p><p class="hang">---. <i>The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction</i>, Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.</p><p class="hang">Freud, Sigmund. <i>Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis</i>. Trans. James Strachey. New York:&#160; Norton, 1966.</p><p class="hang">Greysmith, David. "Patterns, Piracy and Protection in the Textile Printing Industry, 1787-1850." <i>Textile History</i> 14 (1983): <span class="indent">165-94</span>.</p><p class="hang">Haggerty, George. <i>Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century.</i> New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999.</p><p class="hang">---. "Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century." <i>Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800</i>. Ed. Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.</p><p class="hang">Halperin, David. <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i>. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002.</p><p class="hang">---. <i>Saint Foucault:&#160; Towards a Gay Hagiography.</i> New York:&#160; Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.</p><p class="hang">Hemans, Felicia. "The Grave of a Poetess." <i>Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials</i>. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000.</p><p class="hang">Hitchcock, Tim. <i>English Sexualities, 1700-1800.</i> New York: St. Martin's, 1997.</p><p class="hang">Johnson, Claudia L. <i>Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s.</i> Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995.</p><p class="hang">Kriegel, Lara. "Culture and the Copy: Calico, Capitalism, and Design Copyright in Early Victorian Britain." <i>Journal of British Studies</i> 43 (2004): <span class="indent">233-65</span>.</p><p class="hang">Lamb, Charles. "Old China." <i>The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume Two</i>. Ed. David Damrosch et al. New York: Longman, 1999.</p><p class="hang">Liu, Alan. "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail," <i>Representations</i> 32 (1990): <span class="indent">75-113</span>.</p><p class="hang">Lynch, Deidre. "Wedded to Books: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists." <i>Romantic Libraries</i>. Ed. Ina Ferris.&#160;<i>Romantic Circles Praxis Series</i>.&#160;February 2004.&#160; &lt;<a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/libraries/lynch/lynch.html" shape="rect">http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/libraries/lynch/lynch.html</a>&gt;.</p><p class="hang">Messer-Davidow, Ellen. <i>Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse</i>. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002.</p><p class="hang">Miller, D.A. <i>Bringing Out Roland Barthes.</i> Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992.</p><p class="hang">O'Quinn, Daniel. "Preface: Romanticism and Sexual Vice," <i>Nineteenth-Century Contexts</i> 27 (2005): <span class="indent">1-9</span>.</p><p class="hang">Porter, Roy, and Lesley Hall, <i>The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950.</i> New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.</p><p class="hang">Ricoeur, Paul. <i>Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences</i>. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981.</p><p class="hang">Sha, Richard. "Romanticism and the Sciences of Perversion." <i>Wordsworth Circle</i> 36 (2005): <span class="indent">43-48</span>.</p><p class="hang">---, ed. "Romanticism and Sexuality.&#8221; A special issue of <i>Romanticism on the Net</i> 23 (August 2001). &lt;<a href="http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n23/index.html" shape="rect">http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n23/index.html</a>&gt;.</p><p class="hang">Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love." <i>Shelley</i><i>'s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy</i>. Ed. David Lee Clark. London: Fourth Estate, 1988.</p><p class="hang">St. Clair, William. <i>The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.</i> Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.</p><p class="hang">Wordsworth, William. "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." <i>Selected Poems and Prefaces</i>. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.</p><p class="hang">Wordsworth, William. <i>The Prelude (1805).</i><i>The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850</i>. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.<br/><br/></p></div><div class="notesWorks"><h4>Notes</h4><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> Foucault has a complex understanding of exactly what "statement" means; see <i>The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language</i>, pp. 106-17.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> See also David M. Halperin's criticism of this misreading of Foucault in <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i>, pp. 26-32.<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> For a partial bibliography, see&#160;Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, Anthony Fletcher, Tim Hitchcock, Anna Clark, Richard Sha ("Romanticism and Sexuality&#8221; and "Romanticism and the Sciences of Perversion"), and Daniel O'Quinn.<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Compare Ellen Messer-Davidow's discussion of the constraints of literary studies on the development of feminist scholarship, pp.178-82.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> On this phenomenon in cultural criticism more generally, see Alan Liu.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> See Greysmith, and Kriegel.<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> See Amanda Anderson for an argument that Foucault's output is essentially divided between "the critique of bourgeois modernity&#8221; and "the shift to aesthetic modernity&#8221; (198).&#160; In these terms, Loesberg privileges the second at the expense of the first.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> On the importance of considering love in relation to the history of sexuality, see George Haggerty, <i>Men in Love</i>, pp. 18-20, and "Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 70-81.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p></div></div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/elfenbein-andrew">Elfenbein, Andrew</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1512" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">love</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1979" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The History of Sexuality</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/bradford-keyes-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Keyes Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jane-austen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Austen</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-loesberg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan Loesberg</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/minnesota" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Minnesota</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:26 +0000rc-admin14933 at http://www.rc.umd.eduAbout This Volumehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/about.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded">
<div style="text-align: center">
<h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2>
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<div style="text-align: center">
<p><a href="#about">About this Volume</a> | <a href="#series">About the Praxis Series</a> | <a href="#contributors">About the Contributors</a></p>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center">
<h3><a name="about" id="about"> </a>About This Volume</h3>
</div>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px">This volume of <i>Romantic Circles Praxis Series</i> includes an editor's introduction by <a href="#sha">Richard C. Sha</a>, essays by <a href="#sha">Richard C. Sha,</a><a href="#loesberg">Jonathan Loesberg,</a><a href="#fay">Elizabeth Fay,</a><a href="#heydt">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson,</a><a href="#lanser">Susan S. Lanser,</a><a href="#mudge">Bradford K. Mudge,</a><a href="#oquinn">Daniel O'Quinn,</a><a href="#halperin">David M. Halperin,</a> and <a href="#elfenbein">Andrew Elfenbein</a></p>
<p style="text-align: left">In <i>How To Do the History of Sexuality</i>,&#160; David M. Halperin puts to rest the idea that Michel Foucault meant in the <i>History of Sexuality</i> to separate sexual acts from identity. According to Halperin, Foucault never intended to encourage historians of sexuality to neglect the connections between sexual subjectivities and sexual acts. From this came the idea of creating a volume of essays that would take on the history of sexuality in the Romantic period, and in so doing use Halperin to rethink what we now know to be a pseudo-Foucaultian divorce between acts and identities, a divorce that has made sexual subjectivities before sexology an historical black hole. This volume is presented here.</p>
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<p style="text-align: left">The essays and other files were marked up in HTML by Joseph Byrne at the University of Maryland. The volume cover and contents page were also designed and marked up by Joseph Byrne.</p>
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<h3 style="text-align: center">About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series</h3>
<p style="text-align: left">The <b>Romantic Circles Praxis Series</b> is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, <b>RCPS</b> recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. <b>RCPS</b> is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.</p>
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<h3 style="text-align: center">About the Contributors</h3>
<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="sha" id="sha"> </a>Richard Sha</b> is completing <i>Perverse Romanticism</i>, a study of the relationship of aesthetics to sexuality in Britain from 1750-1830. He edited an earlier collection of essays on Romanticism and Sexuality for <i>Romanticism on the Net</i>, volume 23 (2001).</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="loesberg" id="loesberg"> </a></b><b>Jonathan Loesberg</b> is a Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of three books, most recently, <i>A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference and Postmodernism</i> (Stanford, 2005).</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="fay" id="fay"> </a>Elizabeth Fay</b> teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her most recent publication is <i>Romantic Medievalism</i> (2002).</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="heydt" id="heydt"> </a>Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</b> is an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and of Comparative Literature and Humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of <i>Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History</i> (Palgrave, 2005), as well as the associate editor of <i>Last Poems: 1821-1850</i> (Cornell Wordsworth, 1999). She has also published articles on Austen, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Burney.</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="lanser" id="lanser"> </a>Susan S. Lanser</b> is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. She has published widely in the fields of eighteenth century studies, narrative, women writers, and the history of sexuality. Publications most relevant to this contribution include essays in <i>Eighteenth-Century Studies</i>, the <i>Journal of Homosexuality</i>, <i>Textual Practice</i>, and the <i>Huntington Library Quarterly</i>.</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="mudge" id="mudge"> </a>Bradford K. Mudge</b> is a professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver, focusing on eighteenth century literature and the Romantics. He is the author of four books, the latest being <i>The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830</i>. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. He is also preparing for publication two books on the artist Thomas Rowlandson.</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="oquinn" id="oquinn"> </a>Daniel O'Quinn</b> is the author of <i>Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800</i> (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). He has also published a number of essays on Romanticism, theatre and imperial fantasy in such venues as <i>Studies in Romanticism</i>, <i>ERR</i>, <i>ELH</i>, <i>Theatre Journal</i>, <i>TSLL</i> and <i>Romanticism on the Net</i>. He is currently co-editing <i>The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1737-1840</i> with Jane Moody.</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="halperin" id="halperin"> </a>David M. Halperin</b> is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of English, Comp Lit, Women's Studies, and Classical Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Honorary Professor in the School of Sociology at The University of New South Wales in Sydney. His most recent book is <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i> (2002); <i>Gay Shame</i>, edited with Valerie Traub, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.</p>
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<p style="text-align: left"><b><a name="elfenbein" id="elfenbein"> </a></b><b>Andrew Elfenbein</b> is the Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is the author of <i>Byron and the Victorians</i> (1995) and <i>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</i> (1999).</p>
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</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/jillian-heydt-stevenson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/bradford-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/daniel-j-oquinn-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Daniel J. O&#039;Quinn</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jillian-heydt-stevenson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jillian Heydt-Stevenson</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/maryland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Maryland</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/massachusetts" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Massachusetts</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/colorado" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Colorado</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:25 +0000rc-admin14931 at http://www.rc.umd.eduChristopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexualityhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/christopher-z-hobson-blake-and-homosexuality
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="caption" class="alignleft" width="239">Christopher Z. Hobson, <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em>. New York: St. Martin's Press/Palgrave, 2000. xxii + 249pp. Illus: 20 b&amp;w line drawings. $55.00 (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-312-23451-1).</div>
<h3>Reviewed by<br />
Kevin Hutchings<br />
University of Northern British Columbia</h3>
<p>When teaching William Blake's poetry and designs, I occasionally encounter student questions concerning a number of explicitly homoerotic representations in such works as <em>Milton</em> and <em>Jerusalem</em>. Because Blake was not himself homosexual, I have tended to explain these representations as an aspect of the poet's iconoclastic propensity to "shock" his readers out of socially induced modes of complacency (as Blake clearly attempts to do, for example, in some of his more outrageous "Proverbs of Hell" in <em>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</em>). Fortunately, Christopher Z. Hobson's <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em> has given me much food for thought, showing me how incomplete and problematic my understanding of Blake's homosexual representations has been.</p>
<p>I cannot overstate my admiration for <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em>, which is, in my view, one of the most interesting books of Blake criticism to have appeared in recent years. As the book's title suggests, its focus is upon the politics and poetics of homosexual representation in Blake's oeuvre. Combining a keen sensitivity to historical detail with a carefully nuanced approach to formal textual analysis, Hobson offers a new and original interpretation of Blake's work, one that is certain to make an important intervention in Blake studies, English romanticism, and the cultural history of homosexuality. The book's inclusive treatment of both the visual and verbal representations comprising Blake's corpus is highly admirable: presupposing the importance of engaging with Blake's visual art in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of his poetry, <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em> incorporates twenty fine black-and-white reproductions of Blake's art and designs, each of which Hobson skillfully and extensively analyzes, deftly teasing out its homosexual and other cultural implications. Hobson's consideration of Blake's work is at all times intellectually rigorous, deploying a well-balanced dialectical logic to support complex thesis arguments which are carefully and clearly delineated. Hobson's book also stands out for its exemplary presentation: it is a pleasure to read such sensitively argued, elegantly written, and flawless prose.</p>
<p>At the risk of oversimplification, the book's outline may be summarized as follows. In the Preface, Hobson takes issue with Michel Foucault's influential thesis, briefly articulated in <em>The History of Sexuality</em>, that homosexuality was not seen as a distinctive mode of identity (with all-pervasive ramifications) until the later nineteenth century. By invoking early nineteenth-century discussions of homosexual practice as represented in hostile pamphlets and sensationalistic English journalism, Hobson brings Foucault's claim very much into question, thus opening a critical space in which to proceed with his own investigations. In Chapter 1, Hobson conducts a fascinating and informative historical sketch of eighteenth-century homosexual culture in England, delineating among other things the legal prohibitions, mob violence, and penal punishments facing London's homosexual populace. The chapter goes on to investigate a genteel Republican tradition, articulated in English literature from Milton to Cowper, of anti-homosexual thought and sentiment, speculating that Blake was keenly aware of and responsive to this tradition in his own writing and art. Subsequently, Chapter 2 undertakes a critical analysis of the aggressively masculinist heterosexism informing Blake's early views of sexuality and gender. Invoking W. J. T. Mitchell's admonition that Blake scholars must eschew the respectable politeness of their traditional discourse in order to recover a more authentic, "dangerous Blake,"<sup><a name="REF1" id="REF1"></a><a href="#FOOT1">1</a></sup> Hobson explores Blake's early responses to such traditional "obscenities" as masturbation and voyeurism (xii). The remaining chapters build upon the contexts delineated in the book's early discussions: Chapter 3 conducts historically sensitive examinations of the texts and designs comprising <em>The Four Zoas</em>; Chapters 4 and 5 outline Blake's poetic and artistic responses to his most influential precursor, John Milton; and Chapter 6 conducts a paradigm-shifting examination of key homosexual representations in Blake's great epic poem <em>Jerusalem</em>, including a fascinating revisionary discussion of Vala's lesbian relationship with Jerusalem, as well as a comprehensive investigation of Shiloh's status as the only masculine "Emanation" to be directly identified as such in Blake's poetic mythology. Finally, by focusing on Blake's gradually developing advocation of a truly "Universal Toleration," Hobson's Conclusion makes a convincing argument concerning the crucial role homosexuality plays in the development and articulation of Blake's famous, lifelong critique of political and moral tyranny.</p>
<p>During the course of his narrative, Hobson necessarily engages in a fair amount of speculative historicism. Because Blake did not write any straightforward, expository accounts of his response to contemporary heterosexism, Hobson is forced to formulate a number of careful, logical conjectures concerning Blake's likely awareness of anti-homosexual polemics in contemporary literature (polemics which were very often subtly rendered and of minor thematic importance to the works in which they appeared). This speculative approach to history informs other areas of the book's argument as well. For example, by marshaling the liberal insights articulated by Jeremy Bentham in his unpublished critiques of anti-homosexual prejudice in contemporary culture, Hobson reaches the reasonable and enabling conclusion that it was "intellectually possible to arrive at a relatively positive view of homosexuality within the framework of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought--and to do so without being homosexual oneself" (18-19). Thus, while acknowledging Blake's non-awareness of Bentham's discourse, such discussions pave the way for Hobson's subsequent analyses of Blake's developing tolerance for, and celebration of, homosexuality.</p>
<p>Among his productive historical speculations, Hobson proposes that Blake's revised presentation of the Moral Law in Copies C and D of <em>Milton</em> may have been inspired partly by the infamous Vere-street persecutions of 1810-11. At this time, the London newspapers were full of sensationalistic stories concerning homosexual practice, stories which covered and likely helped to encourage violently hostile public reactions against alleged and convicted homosexual "criminals." Although we cannot be absolutely certain that Blake followed these stories, it is highly likely, as Hobson argues, that Blake indeed noticed and responded to them in his contemporary art and writing. While such historicism is frankly and openly speculative, it is consistently productive of new and provocative close readings of Blake's art and poetry. Indeed, at times (as, for example, in Chapter 5's discussion of "'Calvary's foot': Vere-Street and Blake's revision of <em>Milton</em>"), Hobson's speculations make unprecedented sense out of esoteric passages which had not been adequately accounted for prior to the publication of his book.</p>
<p>One of the basic arguments of <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em> is that Blake's view of homosexuality evolved during the course of his artistic career from a relatively negative and stereotypical perspective toward a much more positive and open-minded one. For Hobson, <em>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</em> is a pivotal text in this regard: although the poem and its illuminations hint at alternative modes of sexuality, they seem ultimately to suggest Blake's conformity to the sexual status quo. This unfortunate and oft-indicted textual complicity does not, however, cause Hobson to join the chorus of commentators who have decried <em>Visions</em> as sexually and ideologically regressive. Rather, he sees in <em>Visions</em> the productive (if ultimately unrealized) beginnings of Blake's emerging critique of heterosexism, a critique which, despite its ideological shortcomings, "raises the possibility of sexual gratification other than through heterosexual intercourse" (35). Hobson's critical insight is an important one; for by evaluating Oothoon's discourse on sexual relations primarily in terms of its affirmation or negation of heterosexual equality between men and women, Blake's readers have in recent years often unwittingly produced hetero-normative interpretations of the poem, effacing a whole potential area of inquiry concerning the early development of Blake's sexual politics.</p>
<p>Given its focus on sexuality, Hobson's book has important implications for gender-based studies of Blake's thought. Among other things, <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em> takes issue with the implicit thesis, articulated in the work of scholars like Marc Kaplan, Brenda S. Webster, and Margaret Storch, that Blake's depictions of homosexuality conform to the classical Freudian notion that "male homosexuality is based on unreadiness for mature [hetero]sexual relations and involves symbolic humiliation of women" (142). Anticipating the present-day homosexual rejection of this Freudian dynamic, Blake, in Hobson's view, not only affirms same-sex desire as a mode of physical and ideological emancipation, but also in his later depictions of homosexuality Blake retrospectively criticizes his own earlier "poetics of masculinity," a discourse which, because it tended to affirm masculinist sexual aggression, has understandably led a number of prominent readers to charge Blake with misogynistic leanings.</p>
<p>Thus, in his Conclusion, Hobson responds to critical assessments articulated by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak, whose introductory comments on Blake in their recent anthology <em>British Literature 1780-1830</em> depict Blake as a writer whose philosophy of gender was ultimately in league with the sexist discourses of his day. Hobson's contrary argument is that Blake's conceptions of gender and sexuality are much more fluid and complex than Mellor, Matlak, and others have tended to assume. Since editorial assertions published in anthologies have the ability to exercise a disproportionate influence upon the minds of readers previously unfamiliar with anthologized material, Hobson's critical intervention will perhaps encourage students of Blake to adopt a more dialectical interpretive approach to Blake's writing, one that is sensitive to the manifold complexities informing the poet's representations of gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation.</p>
<p>The only aspect of <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em> that gives me brief pause for regret is the question of the book's position with regard to contemporary critical theory. In the Preface, Hobson identifies his critical practice as "'constructionist' with 'essentialist' leanings" (xvi). Certainly, such a critical positioning contributes to the impressively dialectical rigor informing the book's argument. It is, nevertheless, unfortunate that, in a study of this caliber and importance, the author does not offer a more detailed description of the relationship between his sexual and textual philosophies, including his implicit critique of "constructionist" models of homosexuality (xvi-xvii). In particular, I cannot help wishing that Hobson had briefly situated his criticism in relation to recent and relevant theoretical work done in the dynamic fields of gay, lesbian, and queer studies. After the Preface's above-mentioned and all-too-brief critique of Foucault, which tantalizes one with the hope of a more protracted theoretical engagement, Hobson proceeds directly to his fine historical and formalist investigations, foregoing any engagement with groundbreaking work on homosexuality conducted by theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and others. This omission is regrettable simply because Hobson's work is every bit as astute as the work of these prominent thinkers, and one gets the feeling that by engaging at least briefly with their insights Hobson's book would take on added critical relevance and importance. But this omission is far from disabling; indeed, a major attraction of Hobson's study is its intellectual accessibility: one need not be familiar with postmodern critical terminology and discourse to understand, appreciate, and engage with the book's many fine insights. Thus, <em>Blake and Homosexuality</em> is certain to stand the test of time, being the product not so much of "cutting-edge" theoretical inquiry but rather of exhaustive archival research, thoughtful synthesis, and cogent argumentation. All in all, I heartily recommend this book to anyone pursuing critical interests in William Blake, English romanticism, and homosexual studies.</p>
<p> <strong>Note</strong></p>
<p><a name="FOOT1" id="FOOT1"></a><a href="#REF1">1.</a> See Mitchell, W. J. T. "Dangerous Blake." Symposium, "Inside the Blake Industry: Past, Present, and Future." Ed. Morris Eaves. <em>Studies in Romanticism</em> 21.3 (Fall 1983): 410-16. (<a href="#REF1">Back</a>)</p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-volume-and-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Volume and Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/reviews-blog-categories/vol-5-no-2" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vol. 5 no. 2</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/hutchings-kevin">Hutchings, Kevin</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reviews</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/christopher-z-hobson-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Christopher Z. Hobson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/kevin-hutchings-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kevin Hutchings</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-blake" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Blake</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homoeroticism</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/christopher-z-hobson-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Christopher Z. Hobson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-milton-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Milton</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-blake" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Blake</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/kevin-hutchings-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kevin Hutchings</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 07 Jan 2002 18:58:39 +0000Jeffrey N. Cox48235 at http://www.rc.umd.edu